Head In a Brick Wall Guy

A mental illness and addiction story

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When my wife and I talk about our respective clients (I worked in addictions and mental health, and she is a paralegal), we protect their privacy by using nicknames. So we called this client "Head In a Brick Wall Guy". But I can now say "Richard", because privacy is no longer an issue for him.

Richard was a client at the tiny non-profit where five of us provided advocacy services to people with mental illnesses. His nickname came from a story that he told me about his childhood. When he was about seven years old, he and his brother had a race to sit in a chair that was next to a wall on the other side of the room. Richard missed the chair, and ran into the brick wall at full speed, head first. I do not know whether he ever received treatment, or even an assessment of the effects.

He was intelligent, hard working, emotionally unstable, alcoholic, very short tempered, and kind hearted. When he was in a good mood, he would volunteer to run the front desk at our agency, where he effectively multi-tasked through constant phone calls, drop-ins, and messages. At other times, he would vanish from contact for days or weeks.

When I started working at the agency, Richard was living in a rented "coach house": a garage that had been inadequately and illegally converted to an overpriced and almost certainly unsafe one-room apartment. Another tenant in the house liked to entertain himself by triggering Richard's rage, using tactics such as leaving dog feces on the doorstep of the so-called coach house. Years later, this tenant (the front man of a Canadian rock band) was convicted of rape.

When the landlord evicted Richard, we advocated for him before the Residential Tenancy Branch. Despite the mass of evidence assembled by our advocate, the RTB somehow found for the landlord. Richard then went through a succession of roommate arrangements, each one worse than the last. At one point I told him that he seemed to be a "jerk magnet", and he agreed.

Yet he never gave up. He found work at the bottom level of the movie industry: very long and unpredictable hours of boredom and exhaustion, interrupted by intense stretches of frantic effort. He bought a barely functional car in order to get to the sets, which were often unreachable by public transit, and managed to survive.

When something happened that he recognized as unjust, he had no filters. He told me once that he had seen the rock band front man on a bus. This was long after the eviction. The front man's trial for rape was in progress, and was being reported extensively in the news. Richard stood up in the crowded bus, yelled "YOU LIKE RAPING WOMEN, (name)!!" and got off.

Richard’s last roommate took his money but never paid his own share of the rent. The result was eviction -- from a decrepit and degraded building that was owned by Vancouver's worst slumlord. There was no recourse for Richard, because the only name on the lease was the roommate's, and there was no sublease agreement. He came home from a 12 hour day, on a cold and rainy evening, to find all his property out on the building's front lawn. He called me; we loaded what we could salvage into my wife's pickup truck; and we drove around until we found a cheap motel.

I was now working for a larger non-profit agency, and found a place for him at one of our buildings after about two weeks. At first he bounced between appreciation and fits of anger about some of the other residents, but eventually he settled into what was his first stable housing in years. For a year or two, I had little contact with him.

On one occasion, he sent me an e-transfer for $100, as partial repayment for the motel bill from his last eviction. He told me to take my wife out for a nice dinner, which we did. I had helped other clients by paying for occasional necessities, but Richard was the only one who ever repaid any part of what I had spent.

Then an RCMP officer appeared at my home while I was at work. My wife was working at home. The officer said they needed to talk to me, but gave her no details. She gave him my work phone number.

The officer called. He asked me if I was related to Richard, and if I could put him in touch with Richard's next of kin. There had been a car accident, and Richard was dead. The only name and address that they found in his wallet was mine.

I knew that Richard had a father and brother somewhere, and nothing more than that. I told the officer that I would call the manager of the building where he lived, because residents are required to provide contact information for a relative when they move in.

I called, and left a message. The manager called me back, sounding uncertain. I explained what the RCMP needed. She said: "Yes, he put a name of his next of kin on the form -- it's you."

I had nothing for the RCMP. At this moment, it appeared that he had died with no family connections to remember him or to say goodbye. I cried.

A few days later, to my great relief and no doubt to theirs, the RCMP advised me that they had located someone from his family. I thought that my part in the story was over.

But about a week later, his sister called and invited us to his memorial service. She had more information about what had happened to him: He had recontacted a cousin who lived in the interior, and was very happy about rebuilding the family connection. He had gone there for a quite enjoyable visit, but lost control of the car on the way back, somewhere near Hope. He could have had too much to drink, or he could have fallen asleep -- no one knows.

At the service, it became clear that he had touched many more lives than I knew. His sister was there, as well as a close high school friend, a staff member from the building where he lived, and many movie industry colleagues. Over a dozen people spoke about Richard, and what he meant to them. I learned for the first time about his great love of music. His movie colleagues talked about how hard he worked, about the jokes he played, and about how he concealed his beer in a backpack that he carried with him everywhere. His high school friends talked about his kindness and loyalty. I talked about his journey into, and then out of, what was probably the worst part of his life.

The next day, his sister organized a final and private send-off. She invited his high school friend, another close friend of his from recent years, and my wife and I. We met on the beach at Spanish Banks, about an hour before sunset. His sister had his ashes with her, in a simple cardboard container.

We stood together quietly on the sand. Richard's more recent friend, a First Nations lady who shared his surname but was unrelated, played a recording of a native farewell lament on her phone. His sister, a Wiccan, directed us to face each of the four directions of the compass in turn. She explained the Wiccan significance of each direction, and what that meant for Richard's life and death.

The sun reached the horizon. The high school friend waded out into the cold water with the container of ashes. I played "Danny Boy" on my mandola. My wife's cocker spaniel quietly dug holes in the sand.

The friend let the cardboard container go. It bobbed in the ripples, sank lower as it took on water, and finally disappeared from sight. We watched the water and the sunset, then said our goodbyes to each other and parted, carrying our memories in our hearts.

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